How-To Make Believers out of Detractors – Steps to Success

After hearing from Guy Kawasaki this past week and talking to Tim Ferriss about his road to success, I came away learning something incredibly important: how to make detractors believe in your products or services, and how to make them believe in you.When Guy Kawasaki launched Truemors, he got a plethora of bad press out of it. In fact, out of the forty-one people that commented on his blog about his idea, 17% of them flat out condemned the idea without even giving the service a fair chance. Even I wrote about the site and didn’t have many favorable things to say. But instead of ignoring the criticism and just going with the flow, Guy decided to respond to my commentary and justify his decisions in response to my critique, one-by-one.As Guy points out, he learned something very important from his experience. If you believe that you have a killer product, then you should rely on your instinct and go ahead with it because that is the only way you will ever find out for sure. While people who question your idea may be right 95% of the time, believing that you are a part of the 5% of the time that they are wrong is what makes you an entrepreneur and gives you a shot at success.Furthermore, when I talked to Tim Ferriss, it became clearer than ever that the road to success is not an easy one and definitely not one devoid of setbacks and rejection. While his book, The Four Hour Workweek would ultimately become a #1 New York Times Bestseller and dominate the Amazon charts for weeks, he was turned down by more than a dozen publishers and hundreds more told him that creating a bestseller was impossible. Rather than believing them, packing his bags (or his transcript) and giving up, he persisted, and that’s what paid off.

The book hit the lists in the first week, not because I executed perfectly, but because I believed it could be done. Think big and don’t listen to people who tell you it can’t be done. Life’s too short to think small.

If you don’t believe in something yourself, others are even less likely to believe in it. And if you believe in something enough, then don’t listen to your detractors, throw caution to the wind, believe that you are in the 5% and give it your best shot.